A Pew Research Center study from 2010 found that 20 percent of American women now end their childbearing years without having borne a child, compared to 10 percent in the 1970s. During that time, the public has become more accepting of these women, but 38 percent of Americans surveyed for that study felt this trend was bad for society. When it comes to some other changes to the American family — such as marrying someone of a different race or women working outside the home — the public has said in greater numbers that those trends were good for or at least didn’t harm society.

In advance of the Zócalo event, “Why Have Kids?”, we asked a panel of experts: If Americans have come to accept a range of non-traditional family structures, why does a woman’s choice not to have children still elicit skepticism and judgment?

Bella DePaulo — We want other people to share the worldviews we care about most

“As long as women bounce around kidding themselves that life is full when alone, they are putting their hedonistic, selfish desires ahead of what’s best for children and society.” That was one reader’s response to a 2002 cover story in Time about women who were choosing to stay single and not have kids. At the time, I was just starting to research my first book on single people and I was perplexed. The reader had no relationship to the women in the story — they were strangers. If these women didn’t have qualms about their life choices, why should this guy get so angry about them?

I hadn’t yet recognized the power of people’s views of the world. Worldviews help us make sense of the world. They can boost our self-esteem, enhance our good feelings, and keep our bad ones at bay. We want other people to share the worldviews we care about the most. When it comes to marriage and family, one of the strongest worldviews is that women are supposed to get married and have kids. And if they do, they will be happier and healthier than everyone else — and morally superior, too.

The “problem,” then, with women who do not follow the culturally valued life course of marrying and having children, is that they are threatening beliefs that people hold dear.

What’s more, it is even worse if they choose not to marry or have kids. For example, research has shown that single people who want to be single are judged more harshly than those who want to find a partner. They are seen as lonelier, colder, less sociable, and more miserable. Even more tellingly, other people express more anger toward them. That irate reader of the Time story was not only irked because he thought the women were stupid, but also because they were happy. How dare they claim that life without marriage or kids is a good and happy life — a life that someone would actually choose!

Bella DePaulo, who has a doctorate in psychology from Harvard University, is the author ofSingled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and the forthcomingHow We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com.

Elaine Tyler May — Women have opted out of motherhood throughout history

Womanhood equals motherhood has long been accepted as the norm for women’s lives. But in fact, throughout history, women have often opted out of motherhood. In the 19th century, for example, the average number of births per woman declined by half—from eight in 1800 to four in 1900. Many women chose not to marry, and even some of those who married chose not to have children. The rate of childlessness was at an all-time high at the dawn of the 20th century, and then dropped to an all-time low after World War II in the midst of the Baby Boom.

Today, more and more women are choosing not to have children for a wide variety of reasons. Women without children are not scorned or pitied to the extent they once were, but a stigma still attaches to women who choose not to procreate. It is way past time for that stigma to lift. American women today lead rich and varied lives, with or without partners, with or without children. It is time to celebrate all the choices women have, and protect their ability to make the choice to have children—or not. Besides, there are many ways to have children in one’s life without giving birth to them or raising them. Just ask any devoted aunt, teacher, doctor, childcare worker, or anyone with children in their lives. As one teacher said proudly, “I’m not childless! I have 400 children!”

Elaine Tyler May is Regents professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of several books on women and the American family, including Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Laura S. Scott — People are ignoring studies that point to happy, regret-free seniors who didn’t have children

Behind all the media attention around baby bumps, intentional single moms, egg freezing parties, and celebrity surrogacy is a belief that the only path to a purposeful and fulfilling life is parenthood, particularly motherhood. If you value the experience of motherhood over all other experiences, you will tend to judge someone who values a different experience.

There is also the persistent belief that, if you don’t have kids, you will regret it and die alone or in a home with 30 starving cats. Everyone chooses to ignore the multitude of studies that point to happy, socially connected, regret-free childfree seniors who are living their dreams and contributing in many creative ways. The lingering stigma is puzzling unless you factor in the judgment, unspoken regrets, and dare I say, envy, from parents who say, “I didn’t think I had the choice!”

We now have the means and opportunity to remain childfree, but we have to have the intent and will to resist the prenatal messaging, peer and family pressure, and be true to ourselves. We also have to have reliable birth control and doctors who believe us when we say, “I don’t want kids, ever! And I will not change my mind and sue you if you perform this tubal!”

We also need to be able to wrap our brains around this question: “If everyone is invited to decide for themselves if they want to be a parent, how does our thinking and our world have to change to allow for that?”

Laura S. Scott is an executive and reproductive decision-making coach, author of Two is Enough: A Couples Guide to Living Childless by Choice, and director of the Childless by Choice Project.

Bill McKibben — There’s also prejudice towards people who chose to have just one kid

There’s another choice that yields almost as much skepticism: the decision just to have one child. Surveys show that the biggest reason for having a second kid is so the first won’t be an only child. There may be plenty of good reasons for having a big family, but it turns out that isn’t one of them: all the data show that only kids grow up to be indistinguishable from their peers with siblings. Not spoiled, not crazy. Just fine.

In fact, it’s a perfect example of how easily we’re led astray by prejudice. The “study” that convinced everyone that only children were odd was conducted in the late 1800s, and the definition of “odd” included “very pretty,” “very ugly,” and “very strong.” (It also found that immigrant children were odd; go figure.) The subjects in the study included not just actual only children, but only children in works of fiction.

Happily science has marched on, and so should the rest of us. It’s time that we learned to accept that people, and families, come in many different shapes and sizes; that they face different circumstances and want different things. It’s time, that is, to stop with the judging.

Bill McKibben is a Vermont-based writer whose books include Maybe One: An Argument for Smaller Families.

Melanie Notkin — Choose happiness

We have “Mom-opia” in America—the myopic view of motherhood as womanhood.,. And yet, the latest U.S. Census Report on Fertility shows that 46 percent of women of childbearing years are childless.

This all-women-as-mother view generates “black and white” assumptions for why women make their choices, ignoring nuances and shades of gray. I worked closely with DeVries Global PR on a 2014 national demographic study entitled: “Shades of Otherhood,” inspired by my book: Otherhood: Modern Women Finding a New Kind of Happiness, to better understand this cohort of modern women. Of the 19 million childless American women ages 20 to 44, over one-third (36 percent) are childless by choice. Some never felt motherhood was for them. Some don’t feel financially secure enough for parenthood. Some enjoy the freedom to live life to what they envision as its potential. And 18 percent of all childless women are on the fence, having not yet made a choice on motherhood either way.

And then nearly half (46 percent) are involuntarily childless, some by biology, and more often, among the cohort I explore more widely in Otherhood, by circumstance.

The women of the Otherhood are often single, often not by choice, and they choose to wait for love before motherhood.

Still, whatever the reason for childlessness, 80 percent of women in our study said they can live a happy life without children of their own. Moreover, even among those who are childfree by choice, 80 percent are “childfull” — they play an active role the lives of other people’s children.

Whatever the choices or circumstances of childlessness, the only way to live a meaningful and happy life is to live an authentic life—making the right choice for oneself, not by the measure of what society believes is the “right” choice. And the only one who can make that authentic choice is the women who chooses. She chooses happiness.

As Christmas approaches, I find myself thinking about a monumental turkey: Jennifer Aniston’s 2010 rom-com The Switch. The movie also featured a turkey baster, deployed by Aniston’s character—a single, 40-something, sadly childless woman—to achieve something akin to an immaculate conception. This plot device may have seemed a little edgy in Hollywood terms but the messaging was as traditional as figgy pudding: to make sense of her life, Aniston becomes a mom and completes her family unit by hooking up with her child’s biological dad.

Heart-warming? Not so much for the many women and men who by choice or happenstance are living their lives without children and as a result find themselves by turns pitied and demonized. Aniston is one such herself, childless despite her celluloid mommy role and the speculation that for years has reliably attended the slightest curvature of her abdomen. A persistent tabloid narrative holds her up as a totem not of female success but of failure; she couldn’t keep Brad and may be leaving it too late to have kids. Now she has bitten back. “I don’t like [the pressure] that people put on me, on women—that you’ve failed yourself as a female because you haven’t procreated,” she tells the fashion magazine Allure. “This continually is said about me: that I was so career-driven and focused on myself; that I don’t want to be a mother, and how selfish that is.”

Aniston’s interview is juxtaposed with photographs of her in diaphanous gowns. The roles available to her, on-screen and off, tend to be limited. To gain and keep attention, women in entertainment must either appear as sex kittens or their comically voracious counterparts, cougars; as kind friends; bitches; or, of course, madonnas. Aniston recently seized on another, rarer, option—playing ugly—and is generating Academy Award buzz with her raddled turn as a painkiller addict in Cake. If she hoists the gold statuette in February, you can bet a familiar serpent will nestle among the accolades. What price Oscar glory? How barren Aniston’s victory? No matter that the instance of women who remain childfree at the age of 45 has risen sharply across industrialized nations, encompassing about a fifth of the female populations of the U.S. and my home, the U.K., our cultural assumptions remain entrenched against the possibility of happy, balanced childlessness.

At no other time of year do these prejudices get quite such free play as during the so-called festive season. Childless by choice, I have often found myself gently resisting the impulse of fertile colleagues to enlist me to be on duty over the Christmas break, either because they assume themselves more entitled to family time or, at least on one occasion, because a kindly coworker imagined work would help to fill my bleak December days. Another annual tradition sees friends and relatives downing enough Glühwein to mutate into tipsy detectives and slurring shrinks. Their interrogations used to focus on my reproductive intentions but these days more frequently look for signs of secret woe.

To deny such woe by word or deed, as Aniston knows, is tantamount to admitting to a character defect or, more accurately, to an absence of character. Motherhood is synonymous with many very real virtues and to abjure its joys is to call into question your capacity for unconditional love, selfless care for others, dedication to the wellbeing of future generations and service to your country. (The French President for decades awarded gold medals to women who produced eight or more babies, raising them “appropriately” within a marriage. A more politically correct age has not scrapped the award but simply extended its eligibility to men.) To choose not to have children, as I have done, or merely to appear contented with the childfree life is, as Aniston complains, to hang a sign around your neck: “selfish”.

The childfree tend to trot out well-honed ripostes. We point out that we have nurturing relationships with many people including children. We talk about the ecological burden of overpopulating the planet. What we rarely do is to accept and embrace our selfishness. Perhaps we should start.

Because here’s the thing: being without children does mean we have fewer pressures on our schedules and our wallets. We are less likely to be elbowing our way through crowds in FAO Schwarz or Hamley’s or gritting our teeth at the prospect of sitting through this year’s top turkey Saving Christmas, even if we are more likely than the reproductively active to have the disposable income to do so. We enjoy the freedom to make more varied—and interesting—use of our time, now and throughout the year.

For women, who continue to lag behind men in earning power and professional attainment, this is a freedom to relish. Maternity all too often marks the start of that divergence, because men and women still rarely share parenting duties equally. Many of my close friends are mothers and delightedly so, but few of them, though feminists and in relationships with men who call themselves feminists, have escaped a career hit.

Some of these friends used to join in the seasonal pastime of quizzing me about my childlessness. This year it is more likely to be their daughters who come up to me at Christmas parties clutching glasses of gin (known to Brits as “mother’s ruin”) and wanting to know whether I really have no regrets. This is what I will tell them. Give yourself a present this year: unwrap the prejudices that determine your decisions. There is no surer route to regret than trying to mold yourself to the popular ideals of womanhood. If you want babies, have babies. If not, not. Whatever you decide, pursuing your goals with a determination that in men would be lauded as ambition risks labeling you selfish. Go right ahead. Be as selfish as Angela Merkel, Helen Mirren, Park Gyeun-hye, Dolly Parton, Gini Rometty, Diane Sawyer, Betty White, Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston. Selfishly I’d like to see women rising in 2015 and beyond.